Why do We Keep Hoping?

Hope is one of the strangest things about being human. We cannot see it, measure it, or prove that it is justified. It is a part of our consciousness, that part of us that science has no explanation for. And yet we live by it. We make plans because of it. We endure difficult seasons because of it. We plant gardens, raise children, make friends, fall in love, begin again and look toward tomorrow because somewhere inside us is the expectation that tomorrow is worth reaching for.

But why?

If this life is all there is, hope becomes a rather perplexing human invention. We know that everything we love is temporary. Our bodies age. People we love die. Circumstances change. Even the happiest seasons eventually become memories. And eventually, we die too.

If death is the end of consciousness, the final closing of the book, then what exactly are we hoping for?

That last part interests me most. Why do we have that hope? Where did that expectation come from?

Hope is more than optimism. Optimism says that things will probably turn out well. Hope is deeper. Hope says that goodness is worth believing in even when we cannot see how it will prevail. And this should cause us to ask some big questions.

Because if death is the end, then hope is ultimately limited to the boundaries of this life. We can hope for a better tomorrow, a better relationship, a healthier society, a more peaceful world. These are worthwhile hopes. But they remain vulnerable to the final fact of mortality. No matter how beautifully we live, death eventually interrupts the story.

So why hope at all? What does it rest on?

For someone who believes in God and in a life beyond this one, hope has a foundation that circumstances cannot destroy. It is no longer merely the hope that things will work out according to our wishes. It becomes the hope that life itself has a meaning larger than what we can currently see. That changes everything. It means that love is not simply something beautiful that happens before death takes it away. Love belongs to something more permanent than the years in which we experience it.

It means that the goodness we do is not rendered meaningless because eventually we will die. It means that suffering, while terribly real, does not have to be the final interpretation of our lives. It means that the people we have lost are not lost forever. And perhaps most importantly, it means that death itself does not get to have the last word.

This is the distinctive hope of Christianity. It is not simply the hope that we will have better circumstances. It is the hope of resurrection ... the belief that God is not finished with us when our earthly life ends. Christian hope rests not merely on the idea that there might be something beyond death, but on the conviction that God has already revealed something about what lies beyond it through Jesus.

That belief is difficult to prove in the way we prove ordinary facts. It requires faith. But faith is not necessarily the opposite of reason; it is a way of trusting what we cannot yet see. And for the Christian, hope rests ultimately not on wishful thinking but on the character and promises of God, who has a long and intricate history with mankind over a very long period of time. That gives hope a remarkable sturdiness ... one with a a broader understanding of reality, one that is beyond just the material.

At seventy-seven, this matters differently than it did at twenty-seven. When we are young, it is easy to imagine that life is primarily about what lies ahead. There are decades to build, discover, repair and experience. The future seems almost endless.

Later, we begin to truly understand that the future has very distinct edges.

We have watched people disappear from our lives. We have said goodbye to parents, friends and perhaps siblings. We have seen our own bodies change. We have accumulated memories because there are now enough years behind us to understand that memories are one of the ways the past stays with us. And mortality becomes less theoretical.

This is why hope seems even more precious with age. It has been stripped of some of its childish assumptions. We know that hoping does not guarantee that we will get what we want. We know that prayers are not always answered in the way we hoped. We know that some wounds never completely disappear and some losses cannot be repaired in this lifetime.

But Christian hope does not finally depend upon getting the life we wanted.

It depends upon trusting that this life is not all there is. That belief changes the way we can live today. We can be content without pretending everything is perfect because we believe there is more ahead than what we can presently see. We can grieve without believing that grief is the end of the story. We can forgive without needing every wrong to be made right. We can love deeply even though love makes us vulnerable to loss. We can face aging without believing that our usefulness disappears when our physical abilities diminish.

And we can even face death with something other than terror. Not because death is easy or that we do not have human fear of the unknown. Not because we fully understand what comes next. But because we deeply believe that death is not the final destination.

There is something almost audacious about that kind of hope. It looks at mortality directly and refuses to surrender the future to it. It refuses to believe that the worst thing that can be said about reality is the last thing that can be said.

We do know that our beliefs support the choices about the kind of people we become as we walk this earthly path. We can become cynical, convinced that nothing matters because everything ends. You've heard the saying "Nothing matters and so what if it did". Or we can live as though what we do matters precisely because love, kindness, courage and goodness belong to something larger than our brief lives.

And there is an even greater possibility: that hope is not merely something we receive, but something we give. A hopeful person changes the atmosphere around them. They remind other people that disappointment is not the whole story. They make room for possibility. They encourage someone else to begin again.

Maybe this is one of the great responsibilities of growing older. Having lived long enough to know how hard life can be, we have the opportunity to become people who do not make life harder for those coming behind us. We can pass along something better than our fears. We can pass along hope. But not the shallow promise that everything will work out exactly as we want.

Something deeper.

The conviction that goodness is still worth pursuing. That love is still worth giving. That forgiveness is still worth attempting. That beauty is still worth noticing. That tomorrow is still worth entering. Because there is an even deeper hope beneath all of these: that our lives are held within a story larger than mortality itself.

And that is what changes everything.

If this life is all there is, then we must make our peace with the fact that everything we love eventually disappears. But if God is real, if Christ is who he claimed to be, and if resurrection is more than an ancient idea ... if there truly is a life beyond this one ... then what we experience here is not the whole story. We are not simply moving toward an ending. We are just moving toward something we cannot yet see.

This is very likely what hope has been trying to tell us all along. Not that life will always be easy and not that we will never lose. Not that tomorrow will give us everything we wish for. But that the story is larger than what we can presently see.

That is real hope.

We hope because something in us refuses to believe that love can be meaningless, that goodness can be wasted, that beauty can simply disappear, or that death can have the final word. We hope because, beneath all our perplexity, we were made for more than we can presently understand. And if that is true, then hope is not foolishness. It may be one of the deepest clues we have about who we are.